ABSTRACT
Conversations abound with nonliteral meanings; sarcasm, irony, metaphors, hyperbole, indirect requests, hints, backhanded compliments, and so on all occur with great frequency (Gibbs, 1994; Holtgraves, 2001a). Nonliteral language, however, is not a monolithic phenomenon. Instead, there are a multitude of ways in which nonliteral meanings can be conveyed and comprehended, and one of the most important ways in which these meanings differ is in terms of their sensitivity to the context. Context always matters, of course, but sometimes it matters more than others. In this chapter I focus on the dimension of contextual sensitivity and argue that many types of nonliteral meaning—especially figurative expressions—are relatively immune to the context; their recognized meanings transcend their occasions of use. In contrast, other types of nonliteral meaning—especially violations of the relation maxim—are completely context dependent. These differences in contextual sensitivity have a corresponding effect on how these different forms are comprehended; contextual variables that effect the comprehension of the latter will not have a corresponding impact on the comprehension of the former.
